Imitation in Death (In Death #17)(38)

Rape, Peabody was sure, just as she was sure' it had to have been brutal. And she'd have been young. Before the job. Peabody had studied Eve's career with the NYPSD like a template, but there'd been no report of a sexual assault on Dallas.

So it had been before, before the Academy. When she was a teenager, or possibly younger. In automatic sympathy, Peabody's stomach roiled. It would take guts, and balls, to face that, to revisit whatever had happened every time you walked into a scene that reverberated-with sexual violence.

But to use it, instead of being used by it, that took more, Peabody determined. It took what she could only define as valor.

"Ready here," McNab told her. "And it's a doozy."

She sucked in a breath, squared her shoulders. "I'm ready, too. Go in the bedroom or something, okay? I want to do it on my own."

He looked at her face, saw what he'd hoped to see, and nodded. "Sure. Nail the bad guy, She-Body."

"Damn right."

She sweated through it, but stayed focused. She stopped asking herself what Dallas would want her to do, even after a point what Dallas would do, and just concentrated on what needed to be done. Preserve and observe, collect and identify.

Question, report, investigate. It began to click for her, the pattern emerging. She waded her way through conflicting witness statements, shaky memories, facts and lies, forensics and procedure.

She built, she realized with rising excitement, a case.

Though she wanted to hesitate on the final stage, the arrest, she bore down and selected. And was rewarded with the graphic of a prosecuting attorney.

Pick him up. Murder One.

"Yes!" She popped up from the chair, did her little victory dance. "I got an arrest. Nailed the murdering bastard. Hey, McNab, bring me those damn potato chips."

"Sure." He stepped out, grinning. He carried the bag in one hand, and was naked but for her summer straw hat. Since it was perched jauntily at his crotch, she assumed her success made him as happy as it made her.

She laughed until she thought her ribs would crack. "You're such a moron," she managed, and jumped him.

For Eve it was a matter of merging bare facts with educated speculation. "He had to know their routines, which means he knew them. Doesn't mean they knew him, doesn't connect them, but he knew. He's too cocky for them to have been random. He trolled first."

"That's the usual pattern, isn't it?" Roarke cocked his head at her look. "If my one true love was a dentist, I'd study up a bit on the latest thoughts on dental hygiene and treatments."

"Don't say dentist," Eve warned, automatically running her tongue warily over her teeth.

"By all means let's stick with bloody murder." And knowing there was no talking her out of another cup of coffee at midnight, had another himself. "The trolling, the selecting, the stalking, the planning. They are all essential parts of the whole for the typical, if the word can be used, serial killer."

"There's a rush in it, the control, the power, the details. She's alive now because I allow it, she'll be dead because I want it. It's clear he admires the serial killers who made names for themselves. Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, so he emulates them. But he's very much his own- man. Better than they were, because he's versatile."

"And he wants you pursuing him because he admires you."

"In his own sick way. He wants the buzz. It isn't enough to kill. That doesn't heat the blood enough. The hunt, being both hunter and prey, that does it for him. He hunted these women."

She turned to the board she'd set up in her home office, with pictures of Jacie Wooton and Lois Gregg,- alive and dead. "He watched them, learned their routines' and patterns. He needed a prostitute for the Ripper imitation, and a certain type of LC. She fit the mold. He expected her to walk along that street at that time. It wasn't chance. Just as Lois Gregg fit his need for a Strangler vic, just as he knew she'd be home alone on a Sunday morning.."

"And knew someone would find her before the end of the day?"

"Yeah." Sipping coffee, she nodded. "Quicker gratification that way. More and more likely he called in the anonymous nine-one-one. Wanted Wooton found as soon as possible so the adulation and horror could begin."

"Which tells me he feels very safe."

"Very safe," Eve agreed. "Very superior. If Gregg hadn't had family or friends who were bound to check on her in a few hours, he'd have to wait to get the next kick, or risk another nine-one-one. So he targeted these women specifically, just as he's targeted the next:"

She sat, rubbed her eyes. "He'll imitate someone else. But it'll be someone who created a stir, and who 'left bodies where they could and would be found. We eliminate historic serial killers who buried, destroyed, or consumed their victims "

"Such a fun group, too."

"Oh yeah. He's not going to copy someone like Chef Jourard, that French guy in the twenties, this century."

"Kept his victims in a large freezer, didn't he?"

"Where he carved them up, cooked them up, and served them to unsuspecting patrons of his fancy bistro in Paris. Took them nearly two years to catch him."

"And he was famed for his sweetbreads."

She gave a quick shudder. "Anybody who eats internal organs of any species baffles me. And I'm off the track."